Very pretty trees!! It's WAY too early for Christmas though. Moore, I love the blue walls in AD's apartment. You posted a pic of that a while back didn't you? It's such a soothing colour.

Such a funny bunny. Is it house trained? We had a bunny for all of about 4 days and it pooped all over the place. I gave it back to the lady down the street. It was her daughter's at school and when she graduated and took a job out of town, she didn't want to take bunny with her and left it with her mother. Could you be a bunny mummy one day too?

So crafty of you to be hiding behind a tree for a photo, lol.

Yep -- I saw those cameras being pulled out, and I most definitely ducked behind that tree! I haven't downloaded my own pictures yet, but I'm not sure I got any pictures that were better than these two. I thought I was posting larger versions so you could see some details, but I guess they were compressed a bit in the process of uploading them to the site.

KaeEll, I can't even THINK about putting a tree up right now. We're barely past Halloween. AD says that everyone out there is beginning to decorate, and she was just all excited about having her own place, etc., so there was no stopping her!

No bunnies for me, thank you. This bunny is relatively house trained when she's in her own little area (uses a special box), but they're nonstop poopers, so it's a constant thing. They're dry little pellets, though, so not too nasty, but NOT my cup of tea. I'm not into birds either, unless they're in the wild!

Even clicking on the picture doesn't make the image quite as large as what I thought clicking on it would give you when I posted it. I think the site wouldn't allow the size I was going for. But, it's okay. You get enough of an idea...

I was laughing with AD about our home tree because it's a real "journey" through time! Each year, when I think the tree is already completely packed, and I still have several boxes of ornaments left, I can't figure out how I'm going to get them all on there like I did the year before. Somehow, I always manage! LOL... There's my German wooden ornaments phase. My leftover from childhood nostalgia stuff. There are various jesters. There's the bicentennial nod. There are the ornaments after kids began to arrive that represented nursery rhymes and fairy tales, there's Victorian stuff, there are the blown glass balls with gold angels, gold trees, and gold birds inside, there are the creches, there are the angels, there are the little porcelain figures that are also bells that my piano teacher gave me when I was eight, there are a few antiques that belonged to Jim's grandfather, and a bunch of ornaments from his childhood. Um... The ones that are really funny are those that were made in Japan many decades ago! The angels and the elves all look Japanese.

Then there is my "natural" phase that's also represented, the gifts that friends and family have given me over the years -- honestly, I forget from year to year what all there is, but everything that goes up there has meaning for me. It's a tree of discovery!!

I told AD that many people prefer to have "decorator" trees where everything is coordinated with their room's color scheme (which she did to a certain degree with the blue ornaments, but you have to start somewhere), but even though ours does ultimately blend in with our living room, it still has all of the real memories on it too.

When my children were babies, and I mean LITTLE babies, I would sit them in their little baby seat or stroller while I decorated the tree. As I would pull out each shiny ornament, I'd dangle it in front of whichever child was the baby at the time, and he/she would kick his/her little feet (you know how they do) in excitement over the pretty object mommy was showing to him/her. And I'm sure that the lights were magic too.

And this brings me to my sister's death which may sound odd in a Christmas conversation, but there's a reason. Christmas was her favorite season, and she died on December 19th. At some point (and we can't figure out when) she realized that she was terminal, and began dividing her silver flatware (which had been collected over the years since she was a baby), and her ornaments between her two boys. She also wrote them a personal note that was put in with the divided items. Each year, my nephews put their mother's note, so filled with love, on their trees...